Column: Laughable bigotry carries an asterisk

Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses, lends herself to being a joke. If you’d like an example, I can show you a great tweet from last week making her look like a Wolf Pack fan.

But as America’s latest zealot grandstanding against human dignity, she really isn’t all that antiquated, removed or out of touch. A vast web of homophobia still underpins our society, and Kim Davis is just the most visible part of it right now.

I understand making fun of her. Her extremism, hypocritical divorces and the fact that Survivor threatened to issue her a cease and desist for playing “Eye of the Tiger” at her jail release make it damn near impossible not to. It’s fine to have some fun at her expense.

But people like Kim Davis are caricatures of a much bigger problem — one that affects your peers all the time.

It’s easy to look out from Chapel Hill and see ourselves as detached from the world Davis inhabits. The truth, though, is that her hatred doesn’t operate in a vacuum. You have queer friends and classmates, and we’ll gladly tell you how homophobia has weighed on each of our lives.

My senior year of high school, a teacher looked me in the eyes and earnestly told me he didn’t “know what to do” with me because he’d never had a gay person in his AP class.

When I’m out in certain parts of my hometown, people yell gay slurs as they drive by. Just a few weeks into my freshman year here, I was walking back to my dorm late at night when a group of guys followed me through McCorkle Place, repeatedly asking if I were a faggot and if my parents knew I was.

For several of my friends, coming out isn’t an option because their parents will refuse them financial support — and without that, they would be forced to withdraw from the University.

In North Carolina, we can all be legally fired from our jobs for being openly trans, gay, bisexual or otherwise queer. In 2012, we watched our neighbors put up signs and cast their votes to outlaw our ability to marry.

And this says nothing of national trends of violence against the transgender community, the magnified struggles facing queer people of color, or the vastly disproportionate rates of homelessness among LGBTQ young people.

Homophobia on all levels still exists. Centuries of prejudice, contempt and disgust didn’t go away because of the opinions of five justices in Washington. Homophobia isn’t an isolated incident just because Ellen DeGeneres isn’t the only gay person on TV anymore.

And this prejudice isn’t restricted to Kim Davis or any other individual conservatives choose to martyr or the internet turns into a meme. Homophobia affects us, your friends and classmates, all the time.

We don’t always talk about it, and we might not act like it, but we do take our preliminary glance-arounds before holding our partner’s hand. We grew up seeing no one like us in the media.

Some of us still go home to families whose love comes with a footnote.

And that’s what we think about when we hear real-life presidential candidates praising people like Kim Davis — when we see people making these issues about their own religious “persecution.” This is what to while we make memes out of tomorrow’s Kim Davis.